This Is Twittering: Meta-Commentary Digest, Episode 57

Sometimes I tell jokes on Twitter and then I freak out and wonder if anybody understood the joke I was trying to make because, OMG, what if I’m not as clever as I think I am!? So then I post them here and explain them and This Is Twittering: Meta-Commentary Digest.

WORDPLAY:

I'd still be pretty impressed by a pony that could do only one trick. I mean, come on, it's a pony—what more do you want?

Here I was trying to do a weird recursive thing that I’m not sure I conveyed effectively. The joke is this: If “being a good judge of character” is part of character, then that means I can’t really know whether or not I’m a good judge of character because there’d be no way to accurately judge myself in that regard. If I am a good judge of character, I’m correct that I am a good judge of character. But if I’m not a good judge of character, I would therefore judge myself to be a good judge of character (and I’d be incorrect because I’m not really a good judge of character). There’s no way to evaluate the truth of the statement because it winds itself up in circles. Get it now?

Here I was doing another weird recursive thing, but I think the joke came across better (if you were looking for it). The joke is this: If I hate (and thus reject) the idea that reality exists outside my own consciousness, then other people are necessarily (kind of) ideas—rather than actual people—so it’s OK for me to hate them without saying “I hate people.”

The root of this joke is the “hate the sin, love the sinner” type of mentality, and how it’s easier said than done. It’s always a struggle for people (religious or otherwise) to reconcile respect for people and disagreement with them. That’s not to say it’s impossible to do—it’s not—but it is difficult. You’ve got to work at it.

WISDOM:

We study history so that we might learn to make fun of the mistakes of the people of the past.

That’s not to say we’re unjustified in condemning the misdeeds of the past (e.g., slavery, genocide, segregation, etc.)—just that we’d be foolish to think that the people who bought into those systems were very different from you and me. That’s the real point of the idea on which I based this tweet (i.e., that we should learn history so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past), but I think we often don’t take that advice to heart.

WORDPLAY:

My eye doctor gave me a prescription that was way too strong. I guess he's more of a pessometrist.